I obviously won't doubt the genius of Terrence Tao, but reading about PhD level research from any other discipline without knowing a yota about it would leave exactly the same impression, even from a lesser scientist. Of course some people are incredibly smart, but there is no need to mythologize their abilities without having any understanding of what they have actually done. Thus I think such an article can only have value for people who at least vaguely understand the mathematics involved.
"How? Because people in the field of neural networks and AI would never claim that Minsky "pioneered neural networks". To the contrary (and as Minsky's wikipedia article – i'm sure the source of this claim – obliquely notes), Minsky's pessimism about the abilities of neural network computing lead to the abandonment of artificial neural networks as a major research topic."
That is a very confused description of what happened. Minsky is in fact a very important contributor to early neural networks theory and what you refer to as his "pessimism", is in fact his proof that a neural network can not be trained in any way to "learn" the exclusive-or logical function (among other things). This is one of the fundamental results in NN theory.
It is easy if the language your compiler is written in is itself running on the JVM and you can access the nice libraries for generating the bytecode, for example ASM (http://asm.ow2.org/) which Clojure uses. I built a toy compiler for a Pascal-like language targeting JVM and conceptually it is easy (as you maybe meant), but generating binary bytecode "by hand" would require a lot of extra work. I took a look at ABCL source, it dedicates at least 100kb of Lisp code to a bytecode-generating library.
By the way, ABCL source code seems very interesting for anyone interested in compilers/interpreters/Lisp.
"Of course you need good scores and good grades to get into MIT. But most people who apply to MIT have good grades and scores. Having bad grades or scores will certainly hurt you, but I'm sorry to say that having great grades and scores doesn't really help you - it just means that you're competitive with most of the rest of our applicants. MIT is very self-selecting in that regard."
If you look at percentage rates, the self-selection of the candidates might make it look like it is not so rigoristic. But take a look at the absolute numbers, for example for the "SAT Reasoning Test Scores (Math)":
1172 / (1172 + 269 + 108 + 2) =~ 0.76
So 76% of the students enrolled have scores in the best 750-800 range.
Speaking as someone who applied for MIT a few years ago, something like this is no longer possible and the "rat race" description used for comparision is now in fact valid for MIT as well.
Nowhere in the recrutation process you have much possiblity to show your "software code" - everything is very formalized and you have to submit your grades, essays on specified topics, pass the SATs and go through a interview (but the interviewer doesn't have to know anything about the discipline you want to study). Yes, you can describe your most interesting projects as part of your application, but if you read the admission blogs and other MIT materials, it is quite clearly implied that unless you have near-perfect grades and/or near-perfect SAT scores, they won't even look at the project descriptions, essays etc. Also there is no way of knowing why you were accepted or rejected, because the whole proccess is 100% opaque to the outside world.
I still think the MIT is awesome and the admission process probably has to look more or less like it looks like because of the volume of applications they have to go through. But the post and some of the comments seem to leave the impression that the MIT addmission comitee will look at every person as a "unique snowflake" to find the really outstanding candidates. In reality, the admission process has to be quite mechanical so that they can at all manage it and only after the initial 90% of the applications gets rejected, they can be scrutinize the remaining 10% in more detail. So, if you want to get-in, you have to "optimize grades and SAT" and "speaking French and Chinese, playing piano and painting abstract art" won't hurt either.
I think you're overgeneralizing, especially 100 various things can be understood under the term "meditation". There is a program for mindfulness-based stress reduction using meditation as one of the elements, with scientifically proven effects: http://www.mindfullivingprograms.com/whatMBSR.php
This is master level, "Captain Obvious"-style trolling, beyond me how this is the top comment in a place like HN.